Staying human.(Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness)(Book Review)

Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness: A Report of the President's Council on Bioethics (Regan, 352 pp., $14.95)

THE media--goaded on by the science establishment--have been in full cry against Leon Kass, the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, accusing him of politicizing the panel and "stacking the deck" with conservatives to reach predetermined results.

For example, when University of California-San Francisco scientist Elizabeth Blackburn was not reappointed for another term on the Council, she complained to anyone who would listen that her absence from the panel undermined science--and her charges were reported widely. She was given space to grouse in The New England Journal of Medicine, and bioethicists who support federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning circulated a public protest petition--generating even more anti-Kass news coverage. On Slate, journalist Tim Noah called Kass a "silly ass."

But all these charges of the panel's politicization turn reality on its head: Ever since President Bush created the Council and appointed Kass to lead it, it has been the supporters of Big Biotech who have been waging political war, striving to subvert and discredit the Council. Never mind that the supposedly stacked-deck Council had divided sharply over whether to permit human cloning for biomedical research, and fully and fairly aired the pro-cloning perspectives, including Blackburn's; and never mind that President Bill Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission unanimously recommended that research cloning be allowed to proceed virtually unfettered, without a peep being uttered about stacked decks.

All this high dudgeon about "politicization" has a purpose: to diminish Kass's influence as a public intellectual--because he promotes human exceptionalism and a belief in inherent human dignity--and thus to diminish the influence of the Council's work. This is a truly unfortunate agenda, because whether one agrees or disagrees with the Council's views, it has provided outstanding intellectual leadership in identifying the moral issues we must ponder as we enter the biotech era. One of its most recent contributions, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, demonstrates the moral depth and intellectual rigor of the Council's deliberations.

This report explores the moral issues surrounding biotechnology's drive to improve human biology and performance. This quest, the Council says, reflects "humankind's deep dissatisfaction with natural limits and its ardent desire to overcome them ... What's at issue is not the crude old power to kill the creature made in God's image but the attractive science-based power to remake ourselves after images of our own devising." These issues are as deep as the Pacific, and not easily grappled with in the facile sound-bite advocacy into which our national discourse has devolved. But this does not mean they are not approachable or understandable. Beyond Therapy has been written in such an engaging manner that it invites any reader to join in the pondering.

The report's discussion is rich and well woven, as it deals with difficult issues of definition. What is the difference, for example, between therapeutic medical treatment and biological enhancement? Or between giving children intense early training, and "improving" them (a deplorable term) through medical and biological modifications of their talents or capacities? I found the book's chapter on "Superior Performance" the most interesting and novel. "At the core of the notion of 'superior performance,'" the Council writes evocatively, "is the idea of excellent human activity: excellent, not inferior; human, not inhuman or non human; active not passive, at-work and not idling." This desire is ...